Month: August 2012

The Birth and Rise of Ethernet: A History - Input Output: Nowadays, we take Ethernet for granted. We plug a cable jack in the wall or into a switch and we get the network. What's to think about? But it didn't start that way. In the 60s and 70s, networks were ad hoc hodgepodges of technologies with little rhyme and less reason. But, then Robert “Bob” Metcalfe was asked to create a local area network (LAN) for Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). His creation, Ethernet, changed everything. Back in 1972, Metcalfe, David Boggs, and other members of the PARC team assigned to the networking problem weren't thinking of changing the world. They only wanted to enable PARC's Xerox Altos (the first personal workstations with a graphical user interface and…

Searching the Internet B.G. (Before Google) - Input Output: The first major search advance was Archie, which beginning in 1990 made it possible to search through a site’s file directories. Archie was painful to use, but compared to what we had been dealing with, it was wonderful. Archie was quickly followed by the University of Nevada System Computing Services' Veronica, which tried to provide Archie-style searches for plain text files. (Via h30565.www3.hp.com)

The History of the Floppy Disk - Input Output: George Sollman, another Shugart engineer, took an early model of the 5.25” drive to a Home Brew Computer Club meeting. “The following Wednesday or so, Don came to my office and said, 'There's a bum in the lobby,’” Sollman says. “‘And, in marketing, you're in charge of cleaning up the lobby. Would you get the bum out of the lobby?’ So I went out to the lobby and this guy is sitting there with holes in both knees. He really needed a shower in a bad way but he had the most dark, intense eyes and he said, 'I've got this thing we can build.'” The bum's name was Steve Jobs and the “thing” was the Apple II. (Via h30565.www3.hp.com)

How to Run Mac OS X Inside Windows Using VirtualBox: Maybe you'd like to test drive OS X before switching to a Mac or building a Hackintosh, or maybe you just want to run that one killer OS X app on your Windows machine. Whatever your reason, you can actually install and run OS X on any Intel-based Windows PC with a program called VirtualBox. Here's how. (Via lifehacker.com)

Preview Fonts with One Click in the OS X Font Window [Mac Tips]: Most OS X apps have a small "Fonts" window that pops up if you want to change your font's options, but by default, it doesn't show you what each font actually looks like. Here's how to show a preview of every font with one click. (Via Lifehacker)

Ghosts in the ROM » NYC Resistor: While digging through dumps generated from the Apple Mac SE ROM images we noticed that there was a large amount of non-code, non-audio data. Adam Mayer tested different stride widths and found that at 67 bytes (536 pixels across) there appeared to be some sort of image data that clearly was a picture of people. (Via www.nycresistor.com)

View more export options in Preview: Preview in 10.8 has removed a number of export options. If you choose File > Export, there are only six options in the Format popup menu, compared to 13 in the Lion version of the application. Alas, this is yet another feature that has more options hidden behind an Option keypress. Hold down the Option key when clicking on the Format menu to see all 13 available options. (Via MacOSXHints.com)

Here are some quick tip(s) for copying a ton of files between unixy machines really fast. You're probably thinking "why not use rsync?"…..well rsync can be miserably slow if your source or destination cpu is underpowered. You can always do a rsync after these commands to make 100% certain that everything checks out, but try using one of these methods for the initial copy: One way of doing it is tar -c /path/to/dir | ssh user@remote_server 'tar -xpvf - -C /absolute/path/to/remotedir' You'll be prompted for the remote servers password or you can use the private key of the remote server using the -i switch in the ssh command. This has the side benefit of preserving permissions. An alternate version of this command can also be used to locally move folder…

Flush DNS cache in Lion and Mountain Lion: To flush the DNS cache in Mac OS X 10.5 and 10.6, run this command in Terminal: sudo dscacheutil -flushcache To do the same in 10.7 and 10.8, run this command: sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder (Via MacOSXHints.com)